Photographer Omar Robles has long been entranced by the country’s
legacy of dance. He recently traveled to Cuba to explore the men and women who
have made ballet such a staple of their lives. “Over the past two
years I’ve devoted my work almost exclusively to photographing ballet dancers
within urban settings,” Robles wrote on his blog. “Cuba has one of the top ranked ballet companies,
thus why I dreamt of visiting the island for a long time. Their dancers are
just some of the best dancers in the world. Perhaps it is because movement and
rhythm runs in their Afro-Caribbean blood, but most likely it is due to the
Russian school of training which is part of their heritage.”

The resulting
photographs, featured on his Instagram, capture some of Cuba’s best
talent jumping, twirling and stretching in the streets, providing a beautiful
and even surreal glimpse of just how deeply rooted Cuban ballet is. Below
is a brief interview with Robles on how he came to photography and how his trip
to Cuba impacted his work.

After around 2013, we start seeing more
discussions of social and political issues around the use of
large-scale consumer and social media data and automatic algorithms. These
discussions cover data and law, data and privacy, data and labour, etc. The
events at the NYC-based Data & Society Institute offer many
examples of such discussions. As did the Governing Algorithms conference
at NYU in 2013, and the Digital
Labor conference at New School for Social Research in 2014. In
terms of publications, the academic journal Big Data and Society,
from foundation in 2014 onward, is of central significance.

However, I have not yet seen these discussions or publications cover the idea I
am proposing here – which is to think of media analytics as
the primary determinant of the new condition of the culture industry,
marking a new stage inmedia history. The algorithmic analysis of
"cultural data" and the customization of cultural products is at work
not only in a few visible areas such as Google Search and Facebook news feeds
that have already been discussed – it is also at work in all platforms and
services where people share, purchase and interact with cultural goods and with
each other. When Adorno and Horkheimer were writing Dialectic of
Enlightenment, interpersonal interactions were not yet directly part of the
culture industry. But in "software culture", they too have become
"industrialized"

For example, to make its search service possible, Google continuously analyses
the full content and mark-up of billions of web pages. It looks at every page
on the web it can reach – the text, layout, fonts used, images and so on, using over 200 signals in total). To be able to
recommend music, the streaming services analyse the characteristics of millions
of songs.

For example, Echonest,
which powers Spotify, has used its algorithms to analyse 36,774,820 songs by
3,230,888 artists. Spam detection involves analysis of texts of numerous
emails. Amazon analyses purchases of millions of people to recommend books.
Contextual advertising systems such as AdSense analyse the content of web pages
in order to automatically select relevant ads for display on those pages.

Video
game companies capture the gaming actions of millions of players to optimize
game design. Facebook algorithms analyse all updates by all
your friends to automatically select which ones to show in your feed. And it
does so for every one of Facebook's 1.5 billion users. According to estimates,
in 2014 Facebook was processing 600 terabytes of fresh data per day.

The development of algorithms and software systems that make all this analysis
possible is carried out by researchers in a number of academic fields including
machine learning, data mining, computer vision, music information retrieval,
computational linguistics, natural language processing and other areas of
computer science. The newer term "data science" refers to
professionals with advanced computer science degrees who know contemporary
algorithms and methods for data analysis (described by the overlapping umbrella
terms of "data mining", "machine learning" and
"AI"), as well as classical statistics. Using current technologies,
they can implement the gathering, analysis, reporting and storage of big data.

To speed up the progress of research, most top companies share many parts of
their key code. For example, on 9 November 2015, Google open sourced TensorFlow,
the data and media analysis system that powers many of its services. Companies
also open sourced their software systems for organizing massive datasets, such
as Cassandra and Hive (Facebook).

The practices involved in the massive analysis of content and interaction data
across media and culture industries were established between approximately 1995
(early web search engines) and 2010 (when Facebook reached 500 million users).
Today they are routinely carried out by every large media company on a daily
basis – and increasingly in real-time.

This is the new "big data" stage in the development of modern
technological media. It follows on from previous stages such as mass
reproduction (1500-), broadcasting (1920-) and the Web (1993-)…Read more:

Twenty-five years after the USSR's
collapse, writes Maria Stepanova, history has turned into a kind of minefield,
a realm of constant, traumatic revision. As a result, Russia is living in a
schizoid present where the urgent need for a new language is far from being
met.

.. last
but not least, an unexpectedly judgmental feature, which I regard as
extraordinarily important in this context. It is lying. When there are no
verified facts and no experts who can assess what is going on, the door opens
to negating reality as such. This means that truth and lies, good and evil,
black and white no longer seem to exist. They become infinitely
interchangeable, blurred in what is essentially an artistic pursuit.(NB: The socially complicit disappearance of truth described admirably by Stepanova in this essay is a precise marker of modern nihilism. When reality and objectivity are reduced to aesthetic functions and pure whim, we are at a loss to speak intelligibly about anything significant in the world around us. 'All that is solid melts into air' - DS)It has
often been noted that one of the key invariables of pro-Putin rhetoric and the
official media can be summed up by the adage "we are all tarred with the
same brush". The point is not to whitewash or justify one's own actions
but rather to point out that everyone does the same. "We are no better
that the others but we are no worse either."

In this sense the very issue of ethics as
such, of the legitimacy of the Russian regime's actions, becomes a moot point.
Perceiving reality merely as a fiction enables us to disregard ethical
judgement and the existence of truth, and worry only about the momentary impact
and immediate persuasiveness of the immediate utterance. Tomorrow's truth
easily supplants the truth of today and the truth of the day after tomorrow replaces
that of tomorrow. Today we say there are no Russian troops in Crimea and three
months later we describe in detail the exact way the military operation was
carried out and who exactly was involved in it. And these two statements in
their completely primeval innocence co-exist in the same information space,
without negating or changing anything.

What matters is that all these truths and untruths use yesterday's language.
And that, I would say, is the main problem Russian society faces today on every
level. Putin's regime and the opposition both face the same problem, as does –
with particular urgency – the intellectual community..

Many observers have been puzzled and
fascinated by the strange metamorphoses Russia and the country's social
consciousness have undergone over the past fifteen years. What has happened
over the past three or four years in particular has been impossible to ignore.
These changes have to be viewed within the wider, global context in which they
have occurred. However, that doesn't make what is happening in Russia less
grotesque nor does it make the regression that has marked every aspect of
Russia's cultural and social life – from medicine and education, through human
rights to the press that no longer fulfils its role, turning increasingly into
a propaganda mouthpiece – any less spectacular. Nevertheless, the global
context has to be taken into account.

The debate about the end of history started quite a while ago. There is,
however, some difference between "the end of history" as originally
understood by Alexander Kojève – who sees the ideal state as a machine that
satisfies its citizens in so many different ways as to render history as a
movement or progression unnecessary – and the situation we are experiencing at
present, when every possible idea concerning the future arouses fear, tension
and concern.

It is a rather alarming sign that the
culture of modernity in which we live has been marked by a fear and distrust of
the future. For one of the fundamental ideas of modernity has been a sustained
effort to change our lives, gradually arriving at something "new", in
the sense of "better". In fact, for the past two centuries, progress
has been a key word. Lately, however, the idea of creating something new not as
a tool, but as a point of reference, something that is worth aiming for, has
been disappearing from our horizon.

Since sometime in the late 1980s, the history of mankind has for the first time
in a long while stopped being understood as a history of progress. Until then
the future was seen, metaphorically speaking, in terms of the vision of the
Strugatsky brothers, that is, a future in which wonderful, advanced people live
in a society that is virtually perfect, solving technical problems and
correcting the mistakes of parallel universes. But at some point, around the
time of the collapse of the Soviet Union and fall of the Berlin Wall, the only
imaginable version of the future that remained was a dystopian one, which had
to be avoided at all cost. It would be interesting to discover the exact point
at which utopian thinking turned dystopian, when history started to accelerate.
So what happened in popular culture at this time?

For a relatively short period, the future
was still seen through rose-coloured glasses, as a consumerist paradise in
which the idea of progress was linked exclusively to changes in the technical
aspects of life, with the future seen as a "technically improved"
present. A striking example of this trend in popular culture is the Back
to the Future trilogy, which paints an identical picture of the present,
the past and the future, except that the future boasts useful inventions such
as flying sneakers. From the late 1990s onwards, many Hollywood films presented
a dystopian future where only a few survive. It is a future from which one
wants to flee.

What is it that terrifies us about the prospect of history, of being caught in
history? The twentieth century has demonstrated all too clearly where progress
leads. And given that there is no prospect of improvement and that things can
only get worse, a standstill or stasis becomes the desired state of affairs.
And that makes the current situation seem acceptable.

In this way a substitution takes place by means of signing a covert social
contract – we are prepared to consider our imperfect state acceptable as long
as things don't get worse. The first example that comes to mind is the covert
deal Vladimir Putin made with Russian society in the early noughties. Although
the conditions of this deal weren't made explicit until later, they were
acknowledged quite early, in 2002 and 2003, that is, at a time when it would
have been sensible to protest. Yet mass protests didn't materialize for another
decade. In exchange for private freedom society gave the government a virtually
unlimited freedom to act. So, in effect, the future was, rather misguidedly,
exchanged for the present. This consensus continued until the events of late
2011.

The acceptance of the present, and the fear that what is to come can only be
worse still, are quite universal but there is something specific about their
Russian manifestation: I would suggest that in addition to the fear of the
future, which is quite widespread, Russia is living in a schizoid present… read more:

Friday, April 29, 2016

Last Friday, April
21st, four Turkish academics, Meral Camci, Kivanc Ersoy, Muzeffer Kaya and Esra
Mungan, after five weeks remanded in prison, were brought to the Heavy Penal
Court in Istanbul to face charges of making “propaganda for terrorism” and of
association with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), labelled as a terrorist
organisation by the EU and the US. The indictment accused them under Article
7(2) of Turkey’s anti-terror law and if convicted they could face sentences of
up to 7 ½ years in detention.

Although at the end of
the day, the prisoners were released, and the Judge adjourned the case to
September 27th, confusion reigns among the academics and the lawyers.

This trial attracted, rightly,
international attention, as it illustrated how far President Erdogan is
prepared to go to prohibit freedom of speech in order to silence any criticism
of his policies, even when it is clear that the government’s actions breach
both international and European law and its own constitution which guarantees
freedom of speech.

To attack Turkey’s eminent scholars in this
way has brought protests and support for the academics from people all over
Turkey. Thousands filled the square in front of the Court before the hearing
carrying banners and calling for the scholars’ release. Unlike previous trials under the Anti-Terror
Act of lawyers, journalists, trade unionists, and Kurdish politicians this one
was attended by more than eleven consuls including those from the UK and the US
as well as many international observers and human rights bodies. I was there as
an observer from the UK.

These four defendants, two women and two
men, were selected for arrest and imprisonment simply because they happened to
be the ones who publicly read out, on March 1st, in the offices of EGITIM SEM,
the Education and Science Workers Union, the press statement affirming their
commitment to the January “ACADEMICS FOR PEACE PETITION” to President Erdogan
entitled “WE WILL NOT BE A PARTY TO THIS CRIME”.

This petition had been signed by over 1,128
Turkish academics from different universities and disciplines, and now by
several hundred Western intellectuals, including such luminaries as Noam
Chomsky. A further 1,000 Turkish
academics have since added their names to the petition.

The academics denounced the Turkish
government for renewing conflict in the Kurdish South-East and demanded that
those responsible for violations of human rights and humanitarian law should be
made accountable and punished. They drew attention to the perpetration of
collective punishment of civilians trapped in the Kurdish towns and villages
under curfew, the killings, destruction of homes and livelihoods, the
withholding of food, water, and medicine from people in need, and the
displacement of thousands fleeing the violence. They called on all governments
across the world to reconsider their relations with Turkey, and they pleaded
for the resurrection of the peace talks with the Kurds that Ankara broke off in
July, 2015.

Some 50 academics have already been
dismissed from their posts and 27 suspended by the disciplinary committees of
their universities pending the criminal investigations by the Prosecutor of all
the academics who signed the petition.
So there are now over 2,000 Turkish scholars, researcher and university
teachers being accused of supporting terrorism.
This attack against freedom of speech and targeting the intellectual
heart of Turkish society through the universities is the most vicious
illustration of how determined is President Erdogan to allow no criticism of
his policies, even when his actions breach all international human rights and
legal standards. Also it shows the extremes he will go to in order to silence
his critics, including exploiting the already seriously flawed justice system –
flawed because it lacks independence – so as to lock up journalists, trade
unionists, teachers, writers, Kurdish politicians, co-mayors and now its
scholars.

In the packed
courtroom the defendants and their lawyers tore to shreds the allegations
in the Prosecutor’s indictment, because they contained not an iota of evidence
that any crime had been committed. There was, they argued, no proof that any of
them had ever been in communication with the PKK as stated in the indictment,
or even knew its present co-chair Bese Hozat, from whom, the Prosecutor
alleged, they had received orders to write this petition.

“To demand peace is
not a crime” was a constant declaration throughout the hearing. This trial was
described by the lawyers as a “legal scandal “.

“We expect you to end
this parody of a trial, in which there are so many illegal irregularities.
Acquit the defendants and drop this case which is damaging Turkey’s reputation
internationally” urged one of the lawyers representing the defendants.
Ceran Uysal, one of the women lawyers, pointed out that anyway no law existed
regarding the issuing of press statements and that the AKP was targeting and
punishing academics because it feared their influence on intellectual life and
on the youth. Meral Camci, the
psychology professor, spoke for all her academic colleagues when she said “as
scholars we value the truth and critical thinking is central to all our
disciplines”.

Kivanc Ersoy,
the mathematician, in rejecting the allegations, declared “as intellectuals we
have the responsibility to promote peace. We, the intellectuals, are the
conscience of Turkey, just as Jean-Paul Sartre was the conscience of France
when he denounced De Gaulle’s policies that caused such suffering in Algeria.
We should not be punished for it”.

Muzeffer Kaya, the
historian and social scientist, displaying the hand-cuff scars on his wrist,
berated the Prosecutor for the fictions in the indictment that tried to link
him and his colleagues with “people we have never met and did not know”. “We
are scholars, we have ideals, and we are for justice and truth. We have the
right, under Article 25 of the Constitution to express our thoughts, to advance
knowledge, and share ideas. These are not crimes. We have broken no law”. He
said “ We could not stay silent. Our petition is for peace. We could not let
our children pay the price in the future for the government’s mistakes”.

After four hours of
speeches by the defendants and their lawyers, in a court crowded with the
families of the imprisoned scholars, other Turkish lawyers and international
observers, finally, late in the afternoon, there was an extraordinary
development.

Suddenly,
unexpectedly, the Prosecutor, most probably realising that he had been utterly
defeated, that his indictment was shown to be a construction of fictions,
proposed to the Judge that he withdraw the indictment under the Anti-Terror Act
and instead charge the defendants under the infamous Penal Code Article 301.
This article makes it a crime to “insult Turkishness”. However, in 2008, under
pressure from the European Court of Human Rights, changes were made and it is
now obligatory to get the Minister of Justice’s approval to file such a
case. At this point everyone in the public area of the court rose to
their feet shouting “ Shame” and “Release them” until the judge ordered us to
sit down and be silent.

Making such a bizarre
proposal at this late hour clearly disconcerted the judge and his two
assistant judges, who, instead of retiring to their chamber to discuss how to
respond, started to use their mobile phones, under the gaze of all of us in the
court. Everyone wondered who were they calling? Were they trying to
contact the Minister of Justice, or the President himself? For this hearing was
clearly a political trial and required a political solution.

Finally, after a few
minutes the verdict came. The defendants would be released. The
case would resume on September 27th. Since there were no bail conditions, no
requirements of giving up their passports, or reporting to the police, these
scholars would be free to travel abroad, and, if they have not been suspended,
resume their university duties. There was loud jubilation and cheers both
inside and outside the court where hundreds were waiting for news.

But now of course
there reigns absolute confusion, both among the academics (over 2,000 are still
subject to investigation under the Anti Terror Act) and the lawyers. Will the
Justice Minister give the necessary approval for the change of indictment? What
if he does not? Will the original indictment still stand? Does the
proposal to use Article 301 apply just to these four defendants, or to all the
signatories? What are the rights of the academics who have been sacked or
not had their contracts removed? Meral Camci and Muzaffer Kaya are
among the fifty who have lost their jobs. But Camci bravely responds “The
University building may be closed but we can take the university to anywhere”
and has invited her students to her home to continue their studies.

Will everyone who
signed the Petition have to wait till September to know their fate? Article 301
provides for imprisonment from 6 months to a year, but under Article 7(2) of
the Anti-Terror Law imprisonment could last 7 and 1/2 years.

This case has
revealed, like never before, the deep flaws in Turkey’s justice system, and how
it can be manipulated for political ends. It also exposes dramatically how any
criticism of Erdogan and his AKP party is viewed as a crime. Erdogan has
called the academics “traitors”. He has vowed to “annihilate” the PKK.
And the PKK has retaliated by saying that they will resort to force if the violence
does not stop, reminding Erdogan that it was the government that broke the
peace process last year, not them.

This trial has taken
place just when the spotlight is on Turkey and Angela Merkel has promised to
“hasten” Turkey’s accession to the EU if Turkey will contain the Syrian
refugees and stop them from leaving for Europe. But this attack on
freedom of speech and on the academics calls into question whether Turkey will
ever comply with the Copenhagen Criteria which govern EU accession and with
international and European international human rights and humanitarian law. But
does Turkey care? Has it got the EU and the US over a barrel, as it has such a
key role to play in the Syrian conflict and in addressing the refugee crisis?

Easter Sunday in
Lahore, Pakistan – families out for a day in a park … then the world
changed. Yet another set of tragedies, for a society that already has had
so many. People don’t know what to do with their anger. My friends’
FaceBook pages echo their misery. Don’t pray for Lahore, says
one, fight against hateful religious ideology. Someone
puts up a photo of a little boy – her child’s son, gone. Another is
visiting the children in hospital, struggling for their lives. She is giving
them toys her friends have donated; hugs and smiles in amidst the
suffering. There’s a photo of young men crowding a hospital
entrance, wanting to give blood.

Five weeks earlier I
was in Lahore for a literary festival, along with a hundred thousand other
people. Now, when we remember it, it will always be in the
shadow of what came after. But I am putting up the reflections I
wrote about the festival as a tribute to the remarkable people who created
a space for tolerance and debate, and will continue to do so. I am
posting it just as I wrote it before that bomb exploded; including the
prophetic words from the poet Faiz with which the blog ends.

<><><>

I sit on the platform
of the Lahore Literary Festival, looking out over the faces in this packed
marquee – maybe 700 people? In the UK if 20 people come to hear me talk about
my books, that’s a modestly good turn out; I’d be delighted with 40. Here the faces
crowd before me, there’s a buzz of animated talk, waiting for things to begin.
What will I say, to reward the attention of so many people?

The festival is free –
this too is different from any I’ve been part of in the UK. Over the course of
a weekend a hundred thousand of Lahore’s people have come to listen to writers
and artists, journalists and political figures, older people reminiscing and
younger ones arguing. People have had the date in their diaries for months.
It’s more than a book festival, it’s a celebration of all that books can open
up to us. Debates range from highly charged geo-political issues to novels
about personal relationships, from innovation in art to the need to preserve
Lahore’s architectural heritage. There are film actors, museum curators, a
drama production, an evening of Qav’vali singing – sufi-inspired music, a
tradition that goes back 700 years. In the grounds of this hotel that acts as
venue bookstalls have been set up, groups of people browse, families sit on the
grass, young friends meet. Volunteers from local schools are everywhere in
their t-shirts with the festival logo, guiding people, offering help. Speakers
have flown in from 40 countries apart from Pakistan, there are 123 altogether
who will take part — And it nearly didn’t
happen. Back track —

It’s two days before
the festival is due to start, with participants already flying in, and the
government of the Punjab tells the organisers to cancel it. Speakers who have
not yet arrived must be asked to cancel flights. The official reason? The
authorities cannot guarantee security. Well, no one doubts that Pakistan has
security issues but it’s hard not to believe there are other agendas here –
political differences? personal jealousies? The festival organisers come from
influential families and have secured wide sponsorship from businesses, media
corporations, some international cultural sources. The arts need patrons – they
always have done – and you don’t run a free-to-all festival without someone
having to pick up the bill. Many who have helped inspire the festival are
active citizens also in other ways that might have got under the skin of the
authorities, like protesting the bulldozing of heritage buildings to make way
for a new metro line. Is this a ploy to demonstrate who really holds power?

By evening – who knows
what negotiations it has taken – a compromise has been reached. The festival
organisers are told they can hold a reduced festival: two days instead of three
and they will have to find a new venue. This is bizarre – if security cover can
be provided for two days, why not three? And if not in the arts centre
where it was planned to happen, why in a new venue, which turns out to be a
hotel just across the road? Later Mohammed Hanif, author of A Case of
Exploding Mangoes, says, To be a satirist in this country you don’t
have to make anything up. You just tell it straight.

I can just about
imagine what the organisers are going through. For myself, I am just grateful
that I was already here so no one could tell me not to come.

<><><>

So now – while the
festival team work into the small hours adjusting the programme, those of us
already here have a couple of days’ unplanned holiday, in an interesting city
and in excellent company. I share a breakfast table with Muneeza Shamsie, who
has edited collections of Pakistani women’s writing in English, and Claire
Armitstead, literary editor of The Guardian in the UK, women whose writing I
know but had not thought I would ever meet. There’s nothing we can do to help
sort out the problems so we just go with the flow, and this particular flow
carries us through a series of delightful encounters. Claire and I happen to be
in the foyer when one of the festival organisers comes in, checking lists. She
is about to go to the museum where an art historian from India is giving a talk
about Pahari miniature paintings – would we like to go? Sure we would! But by
the time we get there the talk is over and everyone is having tea and delicious
snacks and mingling to chat.

We mingle too – and I discover that hosting the
event is the artist Salima Hashmi, whom I have met some months ago in London.
She is the daughter of Faiz, Urdu’s best loved 20th C poet, and I had contacted
her because I wanted to use my translation of a poem by Faiz in my novel Uncertain
Light. Salima says she is about to take Dr Goswamy, the art historian, to
visit a family museum of Faiz’s letters, books, photos – would we like to come?
So off we go in her car and spend an absorbing hour wandering through Faiz-ghar
(ghar means ‘house’.) The archive of photos give a sense of Faiz’s
wide international contacts – he was not just a great poet but a left-wing
political activist who travelled, met writers elsewhere, addressed trade union
conferences. He was at odds with the Pakistan authorities and spent years in
prison, from where some of his most moving poems were written; and later more
years in exile. I come away with a complete edition of his poems and a
DVD documentary of his life.

We have been here
hardly a day and already we are experiencing that complex mix of
characteristics that strike a new-comer— the easy warmth of hospitality, the
cultural richness, the background of political tension. There’s singing coming
from one room – a tabla player, children learning Hindustani classical music.
Faizghar is a cultural project that tries in a small way to uphold the values
that Faiz believed in – specifically, they are producing children’s books that
teach a respect for human rights and tolerance of diversity. In Pakistan today
people have paid with their lives for upholding these simple values.

Five years
ago Salmaan Taseer, governor of Punjab, was murdered for speaking out against
Pakistan’s blasphemy laws that have been frequently used to persecute
Christians. The story hit the world’s headlines, along with the almost more
shocking fact that many feted his murderer as a hero. Now – looking at old
family photographs – I discover that Salman Taseer was Salima’s cousin; and the
story didn’t stop there. A few months after his murder, his son Shahbaz was
kidnapped. As we stand here looking at pictures of them all as children,
Shahbaz is still missing. The hostage-taking
which is the pivotal event in Uncertain Light might seem to
readers elsewhere to be melodramatic. Here it is a constant possibility; in
this family, an ongoing reality.

<><><>

Friday. This should
have been the first day of the festival, and the new programme has arrived in
my email inbox. Of the planned 99 sessions, 45 are no longer there. Some have
been combined, many more have disappeared. The devastating reduction is not
just because of losing a day, but because the new venue can’t host as many
simultaneous sessions. I scan quickly to see what has become of my sessions. I
was originally down to do three – as a novelist, on translations of Ghalib, and
chairing a panel on education. Which of these have made it into the new
programme? None. A stab of disappointment – to come all this way – but the
feeling is momentary. How gutted the organisers must be feeling at watching
their months of preparation unravel. My own loss seems not particularly
consequential. At least I am here.

With all their
logistical challenges, the organisers are still giving thought to looking after
us, and two young women arrive with drivers and cars to take us to see whatever
we want of Lahore, and the day proceeds like yesterday, a series of unexpected
and delightful encounters. A petite, lively woman in her 80s comes out of the
hotel to join us: it’s Madhur Jaffrey, whom the programme describes as
’The Woman Who Took Curry Global.’ With her is a tall American, her husband.
He’s quiet, and I wonder if he is slightly overwhelmed by being with so many
chatty women. As we wait to set off I ask about his own line of work. He says,
self-deprecating, ‘I guess you could say I spent a lot of my life trying to
master the violin.’ I sympathise – I’m a late starter on the violin and it is
the most difficult instrument. I discover later that he was in the New York
Philharmonic.

Rishm, one of our
guides, is co-ordinating volunteers for the festival. In her day-job she is a
manager in a group of independent schools, trying to inculcate a love of
reading at an early age. It’s the basis of everything in education, she says –
and it’s older pupils from her schools who will be volunteers at the festival.
With Rishm is her friend Saba, co-opted for the day to help take us around. She
is a professor of art in Dubai, back visiting Lahore where she grew up. She
points out buildings to us as we pass – there’s the Art College where she
studied, one of the few places where they teach the skill of miniature painting
– with techniques developed centuries ago to achieve the incredibly fine
detail. You start by catching a squirrel, she says, and laying out a few hairs
from its tail in length order, to end up with a one-hair fine brush. Now she
and Madhur are talking about the merits of different kinds of shawls, and I
realise that too is a science in itself. Later when I read Madhur’s memoir of
childhood, Climbing the Mango Trees, I will find a vivid
description of her mother taking hours to choose a shawl from the array that
the shawl-wala had spread out on the verandah of their house in Delhi.

We arrive at the Shahi
Qila, a vast 16th C fort-cum-Mughal palace, where we are adopted by a guide. Do
we need a guide? Saba and Rishm are doing such an excellent job. But his
persistence vanquishes them, so he comes with us and plies us with memorised
dates and names of rulers that we can’t take in, while we wander looking at
timeless views framed by stone arches. Saba and I look regretfully at the
decaying tile-work and murals. There’s no culture of preservation here, she
says. I have heard there’s been a wonderful restoration done – with Norwegian
funding – on the Shahi Hamam, the 17th C public baths in the old Walled City.
We fantasize about what we would do if we were the custodians of this
fort-palace, and had some funding.

A call comes on my
mobile from Shamain, who has the unenviable job of reorganising the festival
programme. They’ve been trying to work out the best slot to put me in. What
about one of the panel discussions on fiction – ‘The Passion for Love
Literature’ – would that fit my novel? Perfect.

<><><>

Saturday morning – the
logistical miracle has been achieved, the revised programme printed, and people
start streaming in. Through the security checks they come, tens of thousands
crowding the hotel foyers and grounds. You would hardly know the festival team
have had a fraught time and are probably sleep-deprived – they are everywhere,
welcoming, making sure everything happens according to the constantly
having-to-be-revised plan. Crowds jostle to find a place in the opening
session, where the Indian actress, Sharmila Tagore – at 71 looking still
serenely beautiful – gives a thoughtful retrospect of her career in film,
starting with Satyajit Ray films & becoming Bollywood’s most loved heroine.
Then the stimulus multiplies – there are four simultaneous sessions, two in the
hotel’s large reception rooms, two in marquees in its grounds. There are full
audiences in each, and still the crowds mill about in all the spaces in
between. The conversations I overhear among the young are in a lively mixture –
English with Urdu words thrown in, Urdu with English words. I have learnt
Urdu but have never lived in an Urdu speaking society and it’s pleasurable just
moving around the crowds, listening in.

I dip into sessions,
greedy to get a taste of it all. There’s an international flavour even among
the Pakistani presenters, reflecting the globalised pull of education and
professions. Most have had a period living in the US or UK; some are still
based there and have come back specifically for this event. There are ten
sessions on aspects of Urdu literature but the primary language of the festival
is English. Pakistan has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world but all
those with positions of influence are fluent in English, and for many it is
their effective first language. Probably a high proportion of the people
milling about here have had their education through English-medium.

This is a deeply
polarised society, not just in life-chances, but in religion, politics,
attitudes to those outside one’s own group, to women’s roles. All of these
intersect. Few women in the crowds here wear head-scarfs, but without exception
the women in the security teams do, staffing the x-ray portals we all have to
pass through to get in. There are soldiers with guns in the mini-buses that
bring the speakers daily to this hotel, and more standing around the entrance,
looking – frankly – bored. There’s the world moving by in the streets outside,
cars, motorbikes, three-wheelers, and probably none of the people in them are
interested in the issues we’re getting into here. We’re in a bubble of time and
space, removed not just from their world but – for these few hours – from our
own daily concerns, indulging in the luxury of being able to listen, reflect,
enjoy, respond.

In its themes, the
festival faces out to the fractured world we all inhabit. There are sessions on
feminism, a rightwards lurch in South Asia, the effect of politics on
literature, the rich/poor divide. The cross-cultural range presents unexpected
treasures. A Chinese Muslim calligrapher, Haji Noor Deen, plies his art in
Arabic. The Iranian-Azarbaijani-French photographer, Reza Degati, shares what
his observing eye has captured – as someone tweeted, he ‘finds spirit and
humanity in conflict zones around the world.’ Razia Sultanova, an Uzbek
ethnomusicologist, is bringing to light women’s traditional songs which they
kept going through the Soviet era and which male musicians didn’t know existed.
Her writer husband, Hamid Ismailov, talks quietly about the image of railways
in his novels, cross-cutting the vast distances of the steppe, and linking
stories of Central Asia’s complex range of peoples. His books appear in
Russian, English and French but are banned in Uzbekistan. Someone asks why. He
says, ’To an authoritarian government even something written with humanity can
seem subversive.’

He and I were to have
been on a panel called ‘Writing on Exile’ – but that has disappeared. Never
mind, we talk about it anyway, and now we have met we will read each other’s
books. Several younger writers here have exile experience in their backgrounds.
Susan Abulhawa, Palestinian-American author of Mornings in Jenin, had
parents exiled by the war of 1967, and a childhood moving between the US,
Kuwait and Jordan. The parents of Anita Anand, a British journalist and BBC
presenter, were Hindus in what is now the North West Province of Pakistan, and
had to leave at the time of Partition in 1947. Her mother was a baby when they
arrived in a refugee camp outside Delhi. Zukiswa Wanner’s parents were South
African/Zimbawean exiles; she was born in Lusaka, Zambia, the year I left it to
come to Britain.

In a panel on ‘Whose Narrative is it Anyway?’there’s
a question tossing between her and Mohammed Hanif about which was a
comedian and which a satirist. ‘I couldn’t be comedic,’ Zukiswa
says, ‘I was born under apartheid!’ Later I see her at the bookstall.
She has no idea who I am – why would she? Nor had I heard of her until we both
landed here, half-way across the world from where we started. I introduce
myself – ‘I was also born under apartheid!’ She laughs and immediately sends
the ball back – ‘Why aren’t you buying my book?’ So we agree to buy each
other’s.

When I can take in no
more stimulus, I retreat to the speakers’ quiet zone on a verandah overlooking
the pool. Razi Ahmed, founder of the festival, moves among us, checking
everything is fine, introducing people to each other. He is the perfect
courteous host, and keeps thanking us for being here, which makes me laugh –
the privilege is all ours. This is an easy place to start conversations. I
watch people discovering each other, groups coalescing.

We are sharing this
experience, but each of us is making of it our own story. I introduce myself to
the poet Zehra Nigah. Years ago my Urdu teacher and friend Ralph Russell took
me to meet her when she was in London. Now in her seventies, she was one of the
first women poets in Urdu to become well known. Radical, feminist, steeped in
the classical traditions of Urdu poetry, she yet uses the forms to say things
that are new. I remind her that she gave me a signed volume of her poems. My
Urdu wasn’t then good enough to be able to read them; I will go back now and
see if I can do any better. It’s eight years since Ralph died, and a pleasure
for me to be with people who remember him.

Another is Nuscie Jamil, a member of
the festival’s advisory board – she studied with him when she went to SOAS as a
mature student. ‘He was a lovely man,’ she says immediately, ‘always interested
in everyone.’ Nuscie seems to be the original multi-tasker – feminist,
activist, grandmother, runs her own successful business. She starts telling me
about an outstanding school for children of the poorest communities, of which
she is a trustee; and the moment she hears that I am an educationist she is on
the phone to the head teacher, arranging for me to visit after the festival
finishes.

<><><>

Pakistan lies on a
geo-political fault-line, with a deadly nexus of issues that link Afghanistan,
Pakistan, the USA, fundamentalism, and regional security. Ahmed Rashid,
journalist and authority on the politics of Afghanistan and Central Asia,
chairs a session entitled ‘Contemporary Great Games’. I have used his books in
researching for Uncertain Light, and it is to him I owe the
invitation to be here. Looking out for him, I see him taking care of a frail
elderly woman. At eighty-nine Nancy Dupree is one of the oldest people here,
but intellectually still vigorous, an archaeologist with a passionate
involvement in Afghanistan’s history. She is on a panel on how to preserve
national heritage in stressed societies. A young Afghan archaeologist on the
panel says, ‘Don’t dig any more. Leave it in the ground. That’s the safest
place.’

Conflict is written
deep in the history of this city. Lahore lies close to the border with India,
and during the Partition in 1947 – within living memory of the oldest people
here – it was the setting for a tragic history of mass migration and communal
killing. Many prefer not to dwell on it, but the festival opens up these
painful chapters too. Older people are interviewed, remembering those times.
Others critically reexamine the hopes with which Pakistan was founded. One
session is devoted to a leading Urdu writer who chronicled the effects of
Partition, Intizar Hussain. He was to have taken part in the festival himself,
but died just weeks before.

But more significant,
the festival celebrates the culture that Pakistan and India share. Several of
the high-profile participants are Indians who have achieved eminence in
different cultural spheres, and they all get an enthusiastic response – the
film actress Sharmila Tagore, the cookery guru Madhur Jaffrey, the eminent
lawyer and historian A G Noorani, C M Naim, the Urdu scholar. An
estimated 1000 people come to listen to B N Goswamy as he shares his insights
from a lifetime of studying miniature painting. Now in his 80s, he was born in
Sargoda, in Pakistan, 100 miles west of Lahore, and a boy at the time of
Partition. His wife was born in Lahore itself and this is the first time she
has been back. They were invited to the festival by FS Aijazuddin, a fellow art
lover and life-long friend from this side of the border.

And poetry – Poetry is
the most universally loved art form among Urdu speakers everywhere, and any
powerful Urdu poet speaks equally to them all. The depth of this cultural
passion is constantly surprising to outsiders – it’s rare to find an Urdu
speaker who doesn’t know by heart swathes of poetry. There is such a crowd
wanting to hear TV personality Zia Mohyeddin reciting from the great 19th
century poet Ghalib that security guards have to handle potentially unruly
young men, desperate because they can’t get in. The organisers look worried.
Rejoice, I say – in how many countries do young men almost cause a riot because
they can’t get to hear a poetry recital?

<><><>

Day two, Sunday
morning – and here I am on the platform in the larger of the two marquees,
waiting to begin. Few in this audience will have heard of me. The others on the
panel are much better known: Adaf Soueif has come from Egypt – novelist,
political commentator, activist. Kamila Shamsie is the one the audience are
sure to know about, for she is one of their own – she grew up in Pakistan and
now moves between here and the UK. Both Adaf and Kamila are published by
Bloomsbury, and it’s Bloomsbury’s editor-in-chief, Alexandra Pringle, who is to
interview us. The three of them have worked together for years – it was to be
an in-house event, now here I am, an outsider thrust in among them. Muneeza
Shamsie, Kamila’s proud mum, comes to the front of the audience to get a photo
– it makes us laugh, so that’s how the camera catches us. Good start.

I’ve only once before
spoken to a group as large as this. That was at a celebration for Nelson
Mandela in London, where I was one of twenty-seven lucky people (representing
his twenty-seven years in prison) invited to honour him in a three-minute
piece. However different the circumstances, I feel once again the weight of
this moment – being given the chance to share thoughts with all these people.

Our session is called
‘The Passion for Love Literature’. It’s obvious why love is so central in
fiction, because it is central in life. When it is my turn to speak I find
myself saying that though there is a love story in each of my novels, what
matters more to me is that they reflect love of all kinds – for parents,
children, friends, people who inspire us. Uncertain Light is
as much about loss – for when we give ourselves in love we make ourselves
vulnerable. Long after we have lost someone close to us, the love still
infiltrates our lives in complex ways … Looking out over the faces obscured by
light, I am thinking of a woman I met yesterday – young still, but struggling
to get past the loss of her husband. Or Saba, our companion walking around the
Fort – she is back in Lahore after a whole year; it took that long because her
brother was murdered here, for being from a Shia family. Are they perhaps here,
knowing I am thinking of them?

Alexandra moves us on
to talk about ‘transgressive’ love – a theme in all our novels, she suggests.
It’s not a word I have thought to use but I see immediately that she’s right.There’s
a built-in tension between the power of individual love and the constraints of
society, andthe central love story in Uncertain Light raises
moral issues that it does not resolve. How to talk about this, here, with this
audience? I find a way through the ghazal poetry that runs through
the story. The love poetry everyone here has grown up with reflects
a being-in-love that was almost always illicit, and frowned on by society. It
is about feelings that won’t be neatly packaged, and there are few happy
endings. Lovers can seldom have what they long for. I quote Ghalib –

hazaron khahishen
aisi ki har khahish pe dam nikle

bahut nikle mere
arman lekin phir bhi kam nikle

Pleasure ripples like
warmth across the hundreds of people in the marquee. They could have completed
the couplet themselves after the first two words. For the few who don’t know
Urdu, I give Ralph’s translation –

Desires in thousands,
each so strong it takes away my breath anew

Many longings have
been fulfilled; many, but even so, too few.

Everything comes
together – Urdu poetry, Uncertain Light, this audience. When
the session is over, I go to the bookstall to sign copies. Within a short time
it has sold out.

<><><>

Back now in London,
and a month later, I see still pictures of those daysin Lahore, of
thousands of young people coming to listen, talk, & feel connected to ideas
& issues. I am remembering my last day, after the festival was over, an
early morning walk through narrow streets of the old walled city, expertly
guided by Lucy Peck who has mapped it all. Her session talking about all this
was, sadly, one of those cancelled – how lucky for me to have this personal
guided tour. In the 17th C Wazir Khan mosque we admire the exquisitely painted
walls, stepping carefully past an old man who sleeps on the floor.

We visit an
arts centre that trains people in traditional arts including kaghazi pottery: kaghaz is
paper – this pottery is as thin as paper. I buy a bowl, which sits now on my
desk, a small portable part of a vivid craft culture. That afternoon I visit
the school that Nuscie Jamil insisted that I see. We drive far out to an
industrial suburb; the children are from the poorest communities, and are
getting an inspiring education. Two of the young teachers are themselves
graduates of the school, and their faces shine as they talk about how they love
working here.

The big issues of
politics and security continue to flare in Pakistan, exposing the polarisation
of attitudes. A week after the festival an announcement is made that Salmaan
Taseer’s murderer has been hanged. The road from his prison to the capital is
thronged with protesters, and he is hailed as a martyr. One week later, Shahbaz
Taseer – Salmaan’s kidnapped son – is discovered, and freed. He has been gone
five years with no news, now suddenly he is back. Political analysts are busy
trying to make sense of it all. I am thinking of that family, trying to
recover. Everything connects.

I took a half-empty
suitcase to Lahore and have brought it back filled with books by people I have
met. Now I will spend the months ahead getting to know them. I find on my
shelves the collection of poems that Zehra Nigah gave me over thirty years ago.
Opening it springs open a small door of memory – I told her it would be slow
work for me reading them, and asked her to recommend one to start with. She
suggested Samjhota – ‘Compromise’. It’s about a chaadar -
a traditional woman’s blanket-like shawl that can cover her from head to toe:

Warm and soft, this
blanket

Of compromise has
taken me years to weave

Not a single flower of
truth embellishes it

Not a single false
stitch betrays it

It will do to cover my
body though

And it will bring
comfort too,

If not joy, nor
sadness to you

The most beautiful
book I have brought back is by B N Goswamy, The Spirit of Indian
Painting: Close Encounters with 101 Great Works. As I slowly turn the pages
I remember the atmosphere of total absorption in the vast audience that
listened to him talk. There are few written sources on which he has been able
to draw to uncover the background to the paintings; he has done it by close
attention to detail, and a kind of studied intuition – that appeals to me. But
the diligence is awe-inspiring. In an interview with an Indian newspaper he
says he must have scrutinised about 150,000 miniature paintings in his
lifetime, and can clearly recall more than a thousand. ‘You need to absorb a
painting,’ he said in his talk, ‘the way you absorb a poem,’ and he began
quoting poetry. The sounds circled around me. I couldn’t follow the sense; but
everyone else seemed to.

After we had both been
at Faizghar, Goswamy told me of his youthful passion for Faiz’s poems. Once as
a young man he saw on a bookstall a magazine which had printed a new poem by
Faiz. He had no money to buy the magazine so he pretended to be browsing until
he had memorised the poem, then he put it back. He told me that he knows by
heart at least ten of Faiz’s poems. I asked if he would send me a list of them,
and within days after getting back he has done so. Three I already know; the
others I will get to know. Like the greatest poetry, they are both a reflection
on Faiz’s own times, his own spirit, and yet universal. I see in some of them
strands of the lives in Uncertain Light:

mujh se pahli si
muhabbat, meri mahbub, na mang …

Love, do not ask me
for that love again.

Once I thought life,
because you lived, a prize -

And time’s pain
nothing, you alone were pain;

Your beauty kept
earth’s springtimes from decay,

My universe held only
your bright eyes -

If I won you, fate
would be at my feet.

It was not true, all
this, but only wishing:

Our world knows other
torments than of love

And other happiness
than a fond embrace.

Dark curse of
countless ages, savagery.

<><><>

Thank you to Razi
Ahmed, Ahmed Rashid, Salima Hashmi, Nuscie Jamil, moving spirits behind the
festival, and members of the team that made it happen against the odds: Rimmel
Mohydin, Shamain Haque, Aadil Malik, Rishm Najm. Also to Alexandra Pringle,
Adaf Soueif and Kamila Shamsie for our shared session; Raheela Akram of Sanjan
Nagar School, Sarah Qureshi of Faizghar; Saba Qizilbash and Lucy Peck for the
guided tours; Salman Haidar for a gift of a facsimile of Ghalib’s early
ghazals; all the participants for stimulus and company; and B N Goswamy for
inspiration. The translation from Zehra Nigah is by Rakhshanda Jalil; the one
from Faiz is by Victor Kiernan. The photos were taken by Muneeza Shamsie and
Rishm Najm.